Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) Renewal Process

USCIS has published the steps and actions one needs to undertake to renew their DACA application.  Follow this space as I will elaborate on the process in coming days and provide step-by-step instructions for renewing your DACA status.  (This way you don't have to pay those leeching attorneys).

For the time being, check out the USCIS Link for renewal process (or click here if you're applying for the first time).

iReview: The Conjuring (2013)

Starring Vera Farmiga, Patrick Wilson, Ron Livingston and Lili Taylor. Written by Chad and Carrey Hayes. Directed by James Wan. 

If I had directed this film, I'd be one proud young lad.  From the inception to execution, the movie is a smart move all the way.  In this gizmo drenched and uncomfortably transparent world, establishing a horror story in present times is an awkward affair.  Perhaps that's one reason why most of the "scary" films are subterfuge for some weird psychotic experience a character once had in his/her life because ghosts don't stand a chance in the age of Facebook and androids (of course, there are exceptions).

The Conjuring is set in 70's burbs, isolating us from the intruding eyes of technology and hullabaloo of a city.  Throw a grainy dated film look and you're asking for some paranormal activity.   The Conjuring is not pretentious. It believes in everything it depicts - from Satan to demons to spirits. This unabashed conviction bleeds into a viewer as a very personal macabre tale. Simply put, we live their world. 

Ed and Lorraine Warren are a couple who takes pride as "demonologists" but have had their fare share of close calls. Ed, hesitant to take on any case due to the toll their work has taken on Lorraine, succumbs to Carolyn's helpless plea. Carolyn moved to a dilapidated house with her husband, Roger, and four children. Soon after relocation, they found something in the house was awry.  And after some gleefully scary sequences, we find out what the real problem is.  

The movie isn't path breaking in terms of script and plot.  But the execution (like repeated use of zoom, the grainy look) is so reminiscent of yesteryear's classic horror films, a viewer is sucked into the center of drama. Such films, with so deep belief in the occult, are only suitable for a period drama not because they are too ludicrous for contemporary films but the isolation and simplicity of the old times hosts darkness with much more welcoming hands.   I'd say, this one is a winner. 

Feminists just don't get it

“Freedom, if truly alive, manifests itself like the invisible air does in one’s life.”

Courtesy: genderacrossborders

The main beef I have with feminists is that they really don’t understand the magnitude of significance their cause holds towards a social revolution.  These feminists keep stacking one stopgap measure on another and after a while when the bleeding doesn't stop, nobody takes them seriously.  You see, to cure an injury, not only we have to stop the bleeding but our immune system needs to clot the blood.  Let them work on stopgap; we’ll talk about the real issue. 

Female to male ratio especially in developing nations is disconcerting to say the least. The pro-life hippies, the priests and the conservative lot target female feticide and infanticide rampant in the region because these charlatans don’t want you to face the real issue at hand - a social stratosphere immensely warped against women.  Who is responsible for such heinous realities is trivial because those monsters have dried up an eon ago, but what keeps oppression simmering should be the topic of self-introspection at night while staring at the dark, ominous ceiling. This is soul searching and don’t confuse it with some weird transcendental meditative experience which isn't real.

Such elemental parts of our society’s fabric as religion, deism and marriage are nothing but socially imposed oppression sugarcoated with romantic notions.   I have to give some credit to these priests and the conservative lot for figuring out that their existence is justified till women are the weakest link in the society.   But let’s not forget that unmarried does not mean not in love or incapable of being a parent or part of a lifelong relationship. 

Courtesy: World of Stock

Hence, in every walk of life - financial, educational, physical, sexual and perceptual – women should be treated equally to men if we care to solve the problem.  Lack of education (in developing nations), the vicious circle of reproduction and the resulting preconceived notion of dependency is what women need to be liberated from.  Studies show an educated and financially independent woman is less likely to marry in her 20s or marry at all than her counterpart.   And once a woman has complete control on her birthing patterns, she lifts herself beyond unplanned responsibilities and financial burdens.  If she can live independently, she would probably prefer it. 

But since these oppressions jut out from within us, they are the most difficult to tackle as this requires a protest against ourselves and the belief systems etched into our genes for centuries.  So, we don’t.  We’d rather have a government which tackles these oppressions with more legislative oppressions than to face ourselves. 

Most of the bans that our governments have in place are beyond me on a fundamental level.   I have always believed that government’s role is to liberate us from anything that threatens the cause of freedom in the first place but I might just be shooting Dixie out of my rear end.  We must not forget that the writers of the constitutions were part of the society as well. We have criminal laws against rape, but not universal abortion rights. We have criminal laws against domestic violence, but our governments also recognize marital unions.   This schizophrenic government is a mirror reflection of us. 

Courtesy: parentslife.tumblr.com

Government should lift the anti-abortion laws, laws that benefit and propound marital unions and the anti-drug laws but the story will not end there.  Freedom of abortion alone is naturally going to exacerbate low female to male ratio and failure to recognize marriage alone will harm financially dependent women.  Any retardation of freedom, and the key word is any, is retardation of freedom in entirety.  We must not only lift legislative bans but liberate ourselves from socially imposed oppressions as well. 

As a non sequitur, the reason you love those rebellious Bollywood romances is because you wanted your love story to be like that.  But, alas, your story sucks. 

iREVIEW: Talaash (Hindi, 2012)

Starring Aamir Khan, Rani Mukherjee and Kareena Kapoor.  Written by Zoya Akhtar and Reema Kagti. Directed by Reema Kagti.

After Lagaan, Taare Zameen Par, 3 Idiots and Satyameva Jayate, Aamir Khan has been associated with ventures nothing short of path breaking, both from artistic and commercial point of views.  Inevitably, expectations from Talaash are anything but low.  I saw the film after reading a plethora of praising reviews and they took their toll. I was sincerely biased in favor of the film.

And even though the film is much better than some of the recent debacles, I was sorely disappointed.  The film is basically a bi-layered deal, on the top it is a nail-biting investigation following an inexplicable car crash but somewhere the film coaxes us to believe that there's something more, much intense and mysterious than the accident, buried in the life of Aamir and Rani's shattered coupling.

The first half of the film succeeds in holding our attention because we really didn't have any clue what it was all about! It was, in its truest sense, a mystery.  But before we could even get bored and hope that the demystification shall begin soon, we are given some clues as to where the film might progress and we pray that it isn't what we think it is!  I mean, after all, Aamir is in it, right? How could it go wrong?

It does.  And it hurt my feelings.  The film goes horribly trite turning into a monstrosity of boredom.  Barring the few emotionally ripe sequences, the film has little to offer.  The only, one and only, salvaging aspect is the lead performances - of Aamir's, Rani's and Kareena's.

With a sharp first half, hiking our expectations, second half betrayed us like an ex-girlfriend does for dimes.

Essay: Abortion and Women Rights

Few good people have tried to take the problem of female feticide head on but even they don’t seem to be bothered by intentional killing of female fetuses and female-biased abortions so abound in developing nations like India and the subcontinent.  The question and the answer are simple, but they probably have recognized the solution to be very difficult.

People who condemn abortion and contraceptive means on the grounds that such acts help proliferate dangerously low female to male ratio are either ignorant or charlatans.   The fact is that the social stratosphere in such countries is immensely warped against women.  The classic and the traditional norm support women suppression in all walks of life including teen years, schooling, working and housekeeping.  They are the one who render women useless and they are the one who view women as stones of burden.  Life is full of paradoxes, this one happens to hit half of humanity. 

There is something direly wrong with a society in which a parent may find drowning their newborn girl easier than raising her up.  It is not only a psychological theory but a biological conclusion that death of a child is the most unnatural occurrence and hence deepest tragedy for a parent.  Raising a female child has to be worse than this atrocity for a parent to commit such heinous act. 

Naturally if we keep the anti-women sentimentality as a constant and relieve all anti-abortion laws, this will surely result in hike in female-biased abortions.  And once again the society will live with a warped view of reality.  Social revolution cannot take place one step at a time.  It is one of the very few phenomena that don’t work this way.  Simply legalizing abortions will not contribute to the problem of female-biased abortion.  In fact, it will aggravate it.

But if a girl has freedom to go to any school, attend any college, get any job, earn for her family, she is then not a burden but a dignified member of a family.  Revocation of all the traditions that inhibit a female’s freedom and plunge her under dependencies is the first step towards an equal and female-biased abortion-free society. 

Infringement of freedom has many faces, some even the strictest of moderates may not agree with.  For example, females in developed countries tend to marry at a much later age as compared to those in developing nations solely because they can afford a living.  They are not dependents.  A developed and civilized society encourages every human being to be independent in life and thought process.  A human being can only be independent in entirety when there are no legal commitments.  If we think about it, a commitment is a romanticized term for slavery.  It is then reasonable to say that marriages are a logical conclusion of dependencies when seen from a woman’s viewpoint. 

For earning, independent women, marriage is an onset of her lineage of family.  For uneducated, dependent women, marriage is a transfer of burden.  And for a society that discourages every norm which supports women liberation and independence, their women tend to pose burden for their parents, who in turn encourage early marriages.  Moreover, as a compensation for relieving burden off of their shoulder, parents indulge in dowry which usually takes place via abusive and humiliating chain of events.

Why then parents raise a girl child? Why shouldn't they hope for a boy who can earn for them?  When met with such questions, a parent does what it thinks is best for them and the other children, and also, logically, is best for the child they are about to kill.  A child who has a future of repressions has a better chance with no chance at all.

Freedom has to come from all directions.  Most difficult area to liberate is the area of sexuality.  Sexuality must not be repressed.  Many have called marriages as a mean to live with dignity and have sex at the same time.  For odd reasons, developing nations are strictly anti-sex.  But they are the most populous nations in the world with objectionable number of STD cases and deepest of prostitution nexus. Again, the point is repression creates perversion.  Sexual repression creates sexual perversions.  Clearly something is wrong with a society when a lifelong commitment is the only answer to sex.  

Such dark imagery needs to be banished.  It is incumbent on the government to pass radical laws encouraging complete freedom for women from all dependencies including sexuality.  This will shock many parts of the society but this is the time to electrocute them out of their miseries. 

Government must not provide any special subsidies for married couple.  Every couple, unmarried or married, with children must have equal benefits.  Married couples with no children deserve no special tax exemptions.  A parent’s responsibility should be towards their children and not towards one another.  Instead of giving special privileges to married couple, government should encourage live-in relationships.  It can do so by helping couples find accommodation in “broad-minded” localities, protecting threatened couples by providing police security or even relocating them to an undisclosed foreign location.   Media should actively take part in harassing bodies of people who advocate anti-women customs and traditions. 

Women rights issue has often been viewed as much smaller segment of social revolution than it actually is.  Fight against women repression is fight against majority of the social backwardness and oppression.  If fought with rigor, I firmly believe we will peel away social evils such as caste system and religion bias, one layer at a time.  But we can’t peel a middle layer and then ponder why the whole system collapsed on top of each other.  That’s why we can’t simply legalize abortion and hope that the newly warped freedom assigned to women will help solve the whole tree of problems. We have to start peeling out each and every layer of oppression in the society.  It will end with the end of religion and marriage.  

iREVIEW: Sinister

Starring Ethan Hawke, Juliet Rylance, Clare Foley and Michael Hall D'Addario. Written by C. Robert Cargill and Scott Derrickson. Directed by Scott Derrickson. 

Haunted house genre is so trite in its horror parent, I wonder if there is room for something fresh in this lane. A happy family is lured into a house with unreasonably low closing price and then finds themselves chased around by folks from beyond.  Think of all the haunted house movies and I am sure you'll be able to place them all in the aforementioned typecast.

In that sense, Sinister is no different.  Yes, the whole beginning and the reason to move into a new house is atypical and very specific to the lead character's motif but still it boils down to nothing unique.

However, before it is too late, I must add Sinister is a decent film.  It wins in the field of spookiness and for most of us, that's what counts in a horror film. If it can scare you, it's good. For these people, Sinister is a must watch!

Ellison Oswalt, a crime writer who gained unprecedented fame after his first book "Kentucky Blood", moves into a house with "dark" history in an effort to write the next big thing.  Of course, the wife and the kids have had their share of undesired locations but little do they know this time they are on top of a homicidal scene.  From this point on, Sinister trudges down a rather known path but thanks to its creative back story, the film weaves in some really spooky moments.   And that's where it wins.

There is a constant feeling of horrifying claustrophobia as we don't see much of the outside world other than in the grainy 8 mm film reels which Oswalt mysteriously found in the attic   If it was intentional, it is a cunning attempt at horror genre. On one hand, we have a haunted house revealing its macabre and on the other hand, we have these reels with sinister endings as our only gateway to the outside world.  As film progresses and Oswalt tries to cope with the supernatural, the world seems to be closing in on us, choking us with horror.

I believe because Sinister is so sinister at its core that we, the audience, can't absorb it at one point as we are left horrified, scared and sick. And to hide that, we shrug away the film as implausible.

iREVIEW: Up

Starring Edward Asner, Christopher Plummer, Jordan Nagai and Bob Peterson. Written by Bob Peterson and Pete Docter. Directed by Pete Docter. 

Some films defy norms. It's almost impossible to believe that an animated film with its trademarked "unreal" colors and shenanigans could evoke vivider emotions than a "real" film. Up is no less than a work of genius. 

We have heard time and again about macho men who held onto their conviction till the last breath but  seldom come across a man on mission who changes vision and goals as much as we do.  Up is as humane as a film could get. 

Up is about a young child Carl Fredricksen, enamored with explorations and global trekking but his timidness keeps the passion hidden.  But then he finds a girl who is as raw and adventurous as he always wanted to be.  They become best of friends and before we know it, they tie the knot and live happily forever... until Carl's wife dies and he realizes,  entangled in trials and tribulations of worldly life, they forgot to fulfill their mutual dream of living at the Paradise falls. 

And that's where the magic of Up comes in. Till this point animation seems quite pointless.  If this was a "real" film, Carl would be rubbing sole of his shoes at banks and real estate agencies trying to make the dream reality but in this case he simply flies away towards Paradise Island in his house, tied to hundreds of helium balloons. 

He can do this because the point of the story is taking us at a heartbeat distance of Carl's dream before revealing the human out of him.  To the paradise fall, Carl tags along the adventurous, tubby little kid, Ellie, who some would say is what Carl was on the inside when he was that young.

But just when we start to believe that the characters would lessen in layers and succumb to the cracking plot, we are taken aback by the story of it all. Without spoiling much, I can say the film makes us realize that big dreams and lifelong obsessions sugarcoated as ambitions and sacred goals all lose meaning when we fail to act with compassion towards everything, even as little as a bird. 

Up has exceptional animation, great plot, witty dialogues and vivid characters, but it has something more, something which takes us beyond entertainment and forces us to do that we have long given up on doing... introspect!